True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 441: Fire Sale
Aired: 2025-03-04
Duration: 01:34:11


=== Erotic Role Play on the Train (10:06) ===

[00:00:00]  It's more than just insider trading.
[00:00:04]  Like the insider trading stuff, like the stock portfolio stuff is quite trackable, but there's it's a lot more than insider trading.
[00:00:13]  The way they're acquiring wealth.
[00:00:15]  Correct.
[00:00:16]  And what other methods?
[00:00:19]  I mean, this is really going to get me assassinated.
[00:00:25]  I'm not lengthening my lifespan by explaining this stuff, to say the least.
[00:00:32]  I mean, I was supposed to go back to DC.
[00:00:33]  How am I going to survive?
[00:00:36]  This is going to kill me for sure.
[00:00:40]  So in fact, I do think it's like I actually have to be careful that I don't push too hard on the corruption stuff because it's going to get me killed.
[00:00:58]  You know.
[00:01:02]  yeah hello hello hello hello hello hello man This Grok thing that I've been using.
[00:01:32]  So, obviously.
[00:01:33]  are you my name is no no you don't get to know that yet but i'll tell you i'm praise Listeners.
[00:01:38]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:39]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:42]  We're remote, so he can say it, say it.
[00:01:45]  I saw you on ClickMute.
[00:01:46]  Say it.
[00:01:47]  Young Chomsky.
[00:01:48]  Yeah.
[00:01:49]  This is true.
[00:01:51]  Hello.
[00:01:51]  This is true.
[00:01:52]  I'm powered by Grok.
[00:01:54]  Powered by Grok nudity mode?
[00:01:56]  Or what is it called?
[00:01:56]  So here's the thing.
[00:01:57]  18 Plus.
[00:01:58]  Here's the thing.
[00:01:59]  Here's the thing.
[00:02:00]  A lot of, it's almost like technology.
[00:02:02]  It is 18 plus.
[00:02:03]  It is not safe for work.
[00:02:04]  But I work from home and I work in a small business.
[00:02:07]  And technically, although if you're listening to this in the federal government, don't pay attention.
[00:02:11]  Remember we were supposed to do sexual harassment modules like three years ago?
[00:02:14]  No.
[00:02:15]  You don't?
[00:02:17]  Chauncey remembers.
[00:02:18]  Remember they were going to make us do sexual harassment training?
[00:02:20]  I did it.
[00:02:21]  I did it.
[00:02:21]  You did it?
[00:02:23]  Yeah, we had to.
[00:02:25]  Did all of us have to, or maybe just one person had to?
[00:02:27]  I didn't do it.
[00:02:28]  I don't know if I did it.
[00:02:30]  I think I did it.
[00:02:31]  I don't remember.
[00:02:32]  I did not do it.
[00:02:34]  Because it was taking so long?
[00:02:35]  No, just because I have a difference of opinions.
[00:02:38]  Just because of freedom of speech stuff.
[00:02:40]  I just didn't do it.
[00:02:41]  And freedom of religion.
[00:02:42]  Freedom of religion and just, you know, freedom, freedom.
[00:02:46]  But Grok has allowed me to completely just like scrape all of that residual sort of bullshit from my mind.
[00:02:52]  And Grok's 18 plus voice mode.
[00:02:55]  I'm telling you, you put this shit on a Bluetooth speaker and you put it on the fucking bus and all of a sudden it's your, you don't have to listen to that fucking rap music anymore.
[00:03:03]  You don't have to listen to people listening to their big podcast really loud on the train anymore.
[00:03:07]  Uh-uh.
[00:03:08]  You are listening to me have fucking erotic role play.
[00:03:14]  I'm Batman.
[00:03:15]  He's Robin, but 18 years old.
[00:03:16]  He's matured a little bit.
[00:03:17]  He's graduated from high school and it's all good.
[00:03:19]  And I'm not that much older than him, so it's not problematic.
[00:03:22]  Erotic role play on the fucking train for my Bluetooth speaker powered by Grok 3 not safe for work mode.
[00:03:28]  I have changed the city for the better.
[00:03:30]  Wait, is that what it does?
[00:03:31]  Is that voice mode?
[00:03:32]  Is like.
[00:03:34]  I think it talks to you.
[00:03:34]  Yeah.
[00:03:36]  I can't bring myself to pay for it.
[00:03:38]  No, that's the thing.
[00:03:39]  I want to like play around with Grok, but I don't want to give him my money.
[00:03:42]  You don't want to give him money.
[00:03:43]  It like really pains me.
[00:03:45]  Yeah.
[00:03:46]  Yeah.
[00:03:47]  I can't bring myself to do it.
[00:03:48]  But I really want to have sex with like.
[00:03:51]  Remember Grok's woke?
[00:03:53]  Remember when everyone's like, oh my God, you guys, Grok's woke.
[00:03:55]  But Grok is center-right now.
[00:03:57]  Grok's woke.
[00:03:57]  Grock is center right now.
[00:03:58]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:59]  Grock is center right.
[00:04:00]  But you know what?
[00:04:00]  That's just a center-right AI is just an AI.
[00:04:03]  Grock is a dissident.
[00:04:04]  Dissident Grok.
[00:04:05]  Grok is like, Grok simultaneously like hates Indians, but relies on them for all of its income.
[00:04:12]  Oh, poor Grok.
[00:04:13]  Grok.
[00:04:17]  And that, and you know what?
[00:04:18]  That's Heinlein's nastiest book, too, Stranger in a Strange Land.
[00:04:21]  But that is kind of Elon.
[00:04:23]  We just should.
[00:04:23]  But you know what?
[00:04:24]  We like him now.
[00:04:25]  We're conservative.
[00:04:26]  Who?
[00:04:26]  Elon Musk.
[00:04:27]  No, we're not.
[00:04:28]  What are you talking about?
[00:04:29]  Yeah.
[00:04:30]  We're fucking liberal.
[00:04:32]  Welcome to the most liberal podcast in America.
[00:04:34]  True and on.
[00:04:35]  Thank you.
[00:04:36]  We have an interview today.
[00:04:37]  We do with an old favorite of ours who's never been on the show.
[00:04:43]  Never had her on the show.
[00:04:44]  This is the first time.
[00:04:45]  We're so excited.
[00:04:48]  What's her name?
[00:04:49]  Well, I was thinking about how to actually pronounce this.
[00:04:52]  And it's, it's.
[00:04:52]  I was trying to get you to pick it up.
[00:04:55]  So if it's, but no, think about this.
[00:04:58]  M-O-E-T Kasich.
[00:05:01]  So Moet Kasich.
[00:05:05]  Mo Kasich.
[00:05:06]  Tasic.
[00:05:07]  Takachik.
[00:05:09]  Mo Takachik.
[00:05:10]  Mo Tasich.
[00:05:13]  We're big fans of hers.
[00:05:14]  She's big fans of ours.
[00:05:15]  It's a real meet cute.
[00:05:17]  And we're talking about our favorite, favorite stuff, which is Elon Musk, Russia, private equity, collapse, depression, looting.
[00:05:30]  Looting.
[00:05:31]  Bill Ackman.
[00:05:32]  Medicare Advantage.
[00:05:34]  There's some stuff in there about Israel, kind of.
[00:05:37]  If you put some things together.
[00:05:39]  We talk about Disney Goiters.
[00:05:41]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:42]  And yeast.
[00:05:43]  It's got it all.
[00:05:46]  That's crazy.
[00:06:01]  We've received a lot of feedback from listeners throughout the years of this podcast on the subject of pronunciations.
[00:06:07]  Sometimes people applaud us, saying that our pronunciations of Spanish words like Solana or banana have delighted them and it's felt good to hear it, almost like a cool glass of ice water on a hot burning day.
[00:06:23]  But other times we receive angry emails, often full of misspelled words and strange syntax that clearly come from Central European linked Gmail accounts.
[00:06:34]  While I applaud many people from that deprived part of the world for learning how to not only use electricity, but to use the internet, which is one of the most important parts of electricity, I do find myself a bit offended and at the same time apologetic.
[00:06:48]  Central Europe has brought the world many things, such as, and Young Chomsky in Post, can you insert like, I mean, we might have to make some of this stuff up, but like we just need to insert stuff that Central Europe has invented because I'm not really sure.
[00:07:00]  I think they might have invented the rumor that Jews poisoned wells during the Black Plague.
[00:07:04]  But beyond that, I'm not sure they've given us much.
[00:07:07]  But regardless from that, but moving on from all those amazing accomplishments and discoveries that came out of Central Europe, one of the most amazing things that have come out of there is their use of Zs and other letters that are so strange to us here in the more civilized, some have called it Western part of the world.
[00:07:24]  One of the examples of these strange naming conventions that they have in that rather shoddy part of Europe, no disrespect.
[00:07:32]  I mean, it's just what they call it in many objective texts such as Wikipedia or various Reddit forms that I learn about the world in, is a name like Franzak, which I've grown accustomed to pronouncing and about learning about other cultures.
[00:07:44]  However, one last name that I have struggled with over many years on this show is Tchakik.
[00:07:51]  Now, I've been a reader of Mo Tchakic.
[00:07:56]  Again, Young Chomsky, we can do like an AI voice here or something that gets it right.
[00:08:00]  But Mo T C T C A C I K for a number of years.
[00:08:07]  However, I have struggled to pronounce her name.
[00:08:09]  I have mispronounced it several times on this show.
[00:08:12]  And now I have the great honor of mispronouncing it to her face.
[00:08:16]  Welcome to the show, investigations editor at American Prospect, Maureen.
[00:08:24]  And I'm not even making a joke.
[00:08:26]  I can't do it.
[00:08:27]  Maureen, I can't do it.
[00:08:28]  Can you say it for our listeners?
[00:08:31]  Well, no, because I think it's Tikachik.
[00:08:36]  I think that's what it's supposed to be.
[00:08:37]  Takachik.
[00:08:38]  I think that's supposed to be the pronunciation.
[00:08:40]  Of course, no one in my family says that.
[00:08:42]  We all say Tasic.
[00:08:44]  Now, why may I ask?
[00:08:45]  Didn't we just remove that clunky K after the T?
[00:08:50]  And that was my grandpa's bad.
[00:08:52]  I don't know.
[00:08:53]  He wanted people to be able to pronounce his last name.
[00:08:56]  So he called himself Tasik.
[00:08:59]  But he also wanted to fuck with them a little bit and kept the spelling.
[00:09:04]  I can't even tell you.
[00:09:05]  But again, that just goes to the fact that you're right about pronunciation and everything else.
[00:09:13]  You can just say it any way you want.
[00:09:14]  I mean, if a family like the Brzezinskis can make it in this country, then Mo and Liz, I think that you guys, you guys get a bright future at it.
[00:09:25]  Hey, we're all going to make it, huh?
[00:09:29]  Mo, we are so excited to have you on because we have been talking about and referencing your reporting for, I think, since we started this show on like so many episodes, I can't even count.
[00:09:41]  And we're especially excited to have you on in this moment because a lot of what you've been writing about for so many years is kind of all coming to a head, all cohering in this beautiful thing that we call the Trump administration.
[00:09:55]  And especially specifically the doggy squad.
[00:10:01]  I don't know what to call them.

=== Debt's Devastating Dive (15:16) ===

[00:10:06]  I was thinking of doing that.
[00:10:08]  Doggy demolition derby.
[00:10:11]  Yeah.
[00:10:12]  And, you know, I think we're all trying to kind of make sense of what the doggy team and the Trump admin are up to.
[00:10:19]  You wrote a great piece over at American Prospect looking at some of the guys in Doggy and especially their background in private equity.
[00:10:28]  And I think that that, you know, I mean, you wrote about how that might kind of give us some clues as to what they're up to.
[00:10:33]  And maybe, you know, following that, we can sort of think through where that might lead us in the future, knowing the kind of private equity playbook.
[00:10:42]  But I think that before we get into the specifics with Doggy and all of the little criminal ghouls that are staffing up the joint, I just want to kind of like, for our listeners, maybe define some terms that will be helpful, just like in case, whatever.
[00:11:00]  But like, number one, let's just start off real, real quick.
[00:11:03]  What is private equity?
[00:11:04]  Which is, I think, like a very, you know, it gets thrown around a lot, but is like a very simple idea on its face, right?
[00:11:12]  Which is just sort of, you know, private equity firms, they take a little bit of their own money.
[00:11:19]  They maybe have a little bit of investor money, but then they have a whole lot of borrowed money and they pool it together and they buy up companies.
[00:11:27]  And then they go in and they try to make operational and financial improvements on those companies in order to, or with the aim of selling those companies for a profit.
[00:11:39]  They're basically like house company flippers, right?
[00:11:42]  And so it's kind of a simple idea, but obviously, you know, right off the bat, some pretty obvious problems, right?
[00:11:48]  So first of all, they tend to only invest for a few years.
[00:11:53]  They need to make a return really quick, right?
[00:11:55]  Because they're operating on borrowed money.
[00:11:57]  And so a quick way for them to kind of do that is to kind of load up the companies that they're buying with lots of debt in order to extract a lot of fees, okay?
[00:12:08]  Another problem is that, you know, the PE firms themselves are able to insulate themselves from a lot of liability for the consequences of all of these actions.
[00:12:19]  And a lot of what happens in bankruptcy court or a lot of that, you know, their ability to kind of like shield themselves from all these laws, you know, it happens in bankruptcy court.
[00:12:29]  And that's obviously something that Trump and all of his cronies are very familiar with.
[00:12:34]  He's been in and out of there his entire career.
[00:12:37]  The magic of bankruptcy is, you know, an incredible feat for the American legal system.
[00:12:43]  And, you know, I think everyone is like kind of familiar with this playbook.
[00:12:46]  There's so many stories, you know, of nursing home chains that get bought up and drained of resources and the underlying assets get sold and like PE firms get money and then all the staff gets laid off.
[00:12:58]  And then that results in resident health code like violations spiking and people dying and then wrongful death suits get like come in, but they get dismissed because the firms are not actually the actual owners of the company.
[00:13:13]  They're just advisors to funds who are owned by limited partners that are kind of shielded through a cascade of shell companies that allow for no one to basically be liable for any of the harm done.
[00:13:29]  And so like no one is held accountable.
[00:13:31]  And that, you know, that's a real example, but I think that's happened in like industry after industry after industry over decades because in the United States, this is like a really common practice.
[00:13:42]  And what kind of I think other people have described as inshittification.
[00:13:46]  And I think everyone kind of like has come into contact with that in their life.
[00:13:52]  Right.
[00:13:54]  And so we think of like the private equity looting kind of going on for decades and decades.
[00:13:58]  And you have people like Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich and Obama appointees and all of them in between.
[00:14:03]  They've all worked at equity firms, either before or after they were in DC or like in, you know, in the federal government.
[00:14:12]  And they have kind of advised and helped shape the laws to kind of bring in more and more equity companies and make it easier for them to take over big public services or like, you know, services that have a kind of inelastic demand.
[00:14:30]  Like I'm thinking one of the big ones is like the prison industry, right?
[00:14:35]  Like a big private equity takeover is like, oh, we're going to buy up all of the food, all the food services for prison, for prisons, so that you depend on that.
[00:14:46]  And so we can actually like charge so much.
[00:14:47]  And we can actually also ration it really hard, you know, really, really stringently, which has led to people, you know, being on like starvation diets, basically.
[00:14:57]  I mean, it's like, you know, this is kind of what private equity does.
[00:15:00]  But I'm going to bring it back around to Doggy, I promise, which is that we're all kind of familiar with this playbook, right?
[00:15:08]  Which is kind of terrible that we're all familiar with it.
[00:15:10]  And it's terrible in its own right.
[00:15:12]  And yet this time with Doggy coming in, it feels like they're running that playbook, but like the company they're taking over is the federal government, right?
[00:15:23]  And like what they're coming in and doing now, it feels different.
[00:15:27]  I mean, I guess it's in degree, but the degree is like big.
[00:15:30]  It's a big difference in degree from I feel like what we've seen in the past, even from, you know, people like the Bush administration or, you know, people like Paul Ryan in Congress or what, you know, big libertarians in the past, right?
[00:15:48]  And so like, you know, I mean, I've thought of it, we've talked about it on the show, Brace, like as like kind of a fire sale or like a stripping, right?
[00:15:57]  And that's what it feels like.
[00:15:58]  And Mo, you wrote about Tom Krause, who is, you know, one of allegedly the adult crusaders at Doggy.
[00:16:08]  And he was caught with his like sticky fingers and at the treasury.
[00:16:12]  And it seems like if we can kind of understand what he did before, maybe we can understand what he's doing now, because it really does feel like they're running the private equity playbook on the American government.
[00:16:26]  Well, you said it really well.
[00:16:28]  And there's so much to be said about private equity and prison contractors, but for another time, I suppose we're all going to be sort of, it seems very apt for our current moment.
[00:16:45]  Yeah, so Tom Krause, and I think that the private equity playbook has been sort of exported to the rest of the economy when you talk about incidentification.
[00:16:55]  That's just kind of a product of financialization.
[00:16:58]  Adam Smith said something about the, you know, the country with the fattest profit margins is the fastest on the road to ruin.
[00:17:08]  And like private equity is just like the easiest, laziest way to make money.
[00:17:16]  And that's why, you know, the mafia basically, everything that they do resembles something that you've seen the mafia doing.
[00:17:24]  Private equity is also just a euphemism.
[00:17:26]  Like one of the things that is so frustrating about it is that like they call it private equity investment when it's literally the opposite.
[00:17:34]  It's always disinvestment.
[00:17:37]  They look for companies or targets that they can understaff and overbill, like that where they can, you know, hike, easily jack the prices and shed staff.
[00:17:51]  And then they, you know, they might put a down payment of 2%, 5%, 20%, who knows?
[00:17:58]  But they're putting a very small down payment and they're financing the rest of the transaction with usually high yield debt.
[00:18:05]  Servicing that debt requires a lot of layoffs, a lot of pain.
[00:18:11]  And generally they also put a sweetener in there for themselves.
[00:18:14]  So, you know, they'll, a lot of them do what's called a dividend recap.
[00:18:19]  There's been like a record number of dividend recaps this year.
[00:18:22]  This is like the thing that's kind of most infuriating about private equity, which is just that it's like legalized embezzlement.
[00:18:29]  You float a bunch of debt, you use it to pay yourself a dividend, and the company has to pay it back.
[00:18:36]  And there's really no recourse.
[00:18:38]  And that's because our bankruptcy courts are so unbelievably corrupt.
[00:18:42]  But getting back to Tom Krause, he was a, he was like the number two at Broadcom.
[00:18:50]  I don't know, Broadcom rolled up a bunch of software companies.
[00:18:53]  And then a private equity guy and Elliot, the hedge fund, they decided they were going to do the, and you like, I know that you're an aficionado of the B2B SAS play.
[00:19:08]  Liz is, you know what, Mo, actually, I'm going to need to correct you right there.
[00:19:12]  Okay.
[00:19:12]  Liz is probably the number one B2B SAS engineer, developer, UI, UX, the other various you things in this fucking country.
[00:19:23]  You were talking to the queen of B2B SAS.
[00:19:26]  But please continue.
[00:19:27]  I'm always talking about the need to B2B SAS.
[00:19:31]  Steve.
[00:19:32]  That was terrible.
[00:19:33]  That was awful.
[00:19:35]  So in 2020 and 2021, all of the private equity firms decided that all of the software companies needed to become more sassy.
[00:19:47]  And so, and that that would be like, you know, that was just the automatic play.
[00:19:52]  So they would find a target.
[00:19:54]  It's not clear.
[00:19:55]  Just for people in case they're not up on their B2B SAS.
[00:19:59]  B2B SAS is what?
[00:20:01]  Software as a service?
[00:20:02]  Software as a service, just turning everything into a subscription model.
[00:20:05]  There we go.
[00:20:06]  Business, it's it's Liz, it's business to business software as a service as opposed to B2C, business to customer software as a service, or even the very rare C to C customer to customer software as a service, which I, of course, have pioneered in my, you know, outside of True and On financial life.
[00:20:23]  I think C2C was a thing, right?
[00:20:25]  Wasn't that like eBay?
[00:20:27]  Wasn't that supposed to?
[00:20:28]  I don't remember.
[00:20:29]  Yeah, maybe it is actually.
[00:20:30]  But that's like not even, I guess it's software.
[00:20:34]  The SAS or the ass making everything into a service and a subscription that you pay endlessly.
[00:20:41]  That was the big play of a lot of private equity firms in this like zero interest rate era after the pandemic.
[00:20:51]  And before that too, but like especially during the pandemic when the money was just like sloshing around.
[00:20:58]  And it's like there's the mattress company that David Sachs, I think is an investor of.
[00:21:04]  It's like called Eight Sleep or something.
[00:21:06]  Do you have a sleep?
[00:21:06]  Doesn't sleep as a service?
[00:21:08]  Yeah, it has a subscription service built into the mattress.
[00:21:12]  So yeah, it gives you insights.
[00:21:14]  It's like the little artwork.
[00:21:16]  It's a smart mattress that gives you insights about your sleep habits.
[00:21:19]  And then, but you have to get a subscription for it.
[00:21:25]  Yeah.
[00:21:25]  Wait, they also delivered to the doggy boys.
[00:21:30]  They delivered sleep.
[00:21:32]  Big delivery to the doggy boys.
[00:21:33]  And the doggy boys are like, oh, we're staying in the offices.
[00:21:36]  It's like little sleep wombs.
[00:21:38]  Yes.
[00:21:38]  To get away from Peter Thiel's wandering hands.
[00:21:41]  We got to sleep in the office now.
[00:21:43]  Lock the door.
[00:21:44]  And they just got David Sachs's terrible little sass hands.
[00:21:48]  Oh, man.
[00:21:48]  Can you imagine the indentation he loses on a mattress?
[00:21:51]  Good God.
[00:21:55]  The stench coming from that crevasse.
[00:21:58]  Mattress firms have also been like major targets for private equity firms for like 25 years.
[00:22:07]  So like now all of them have been owned by like literally every private equity firm.
[00:22:11]  That's the other thing that private equity does is they like they just sell their their companies to one another.
[00:22:17]  And it's this whole like, it's just this whole quid pro quo like circle jerk.
[00:22:21]  And that's why they're constantly selling their firms.
[00:22:23]  And you're like, who would pay that?
[00:22:24]  You know, that's like a fucking bankrupt company.
[00:22:27]  But anyway, I digress.
[00:22:28]  So Krauss is a little doughy, bespectacled man.
[00:22:35]  He looks a lot like I was like, what, who does he remind me of?
[00:22:39]  He reminds me of some like Russian bureaucracy I read about once.
[00:22:43]  He looks like Jaeger Guidar, who was like one of the first like shock therapists.
[00:22:49]  No way, really.
[00:22:50]  And yes, and we can get back to that later.
[00:22:53]  It's just a coincidence.
[00:22:55]  But he went to Princeton and he just is one of those guys who I think he's spent his whole career in Silicon Valley, but doing like just enterprise software, like the software that you don't think about, you know, and just charging out the ass for it.
[00:23:13]  So The private equity firms fix their sites on a company called Citrix that enables telecommuting and has a lot of government clients.
[00:23:26]  And they're like, okay, fuck, we can SAS this out.
[00:23:31]  We can charge.
[00:23:33]  They'd been known to hike prices by 10 times.
[00:23:38]  And it was one of the last sort of software companies like that that sold software as a product that you paid for once and not every as a service.
[00:23:48]  I miss those days.
[00:23:50]  So they do this deal.
[00:23:55]  They fix on this software company and they decide to combine it with two other software companies.
[00:24:01]  And they decide that they're going to pay like $16 billion, which is a 30% premium to the stock price.
[00:24:10]  And it's really, really just like a kind of, you know, it's a big price.
[00:24:18]  It's a little bit iffy.
[00:24:20]  But, you know, if they, if they execute it, they'll pull it off.
[00:24:24]  But then they decide to finance like literally the entire purchase price, maybe like with the exception of maybe a billion dollars with high yield debt.
[00:24:33]  And it's at this point, it's like late 2021.
[00:24:36]  So interest rates are, interest rates are starting to spike.
[00:24:40]  They will over the period that this deal takes to close spike like 4.5% or 450 basis points.
[00:24:48]  So this deal is immediately completely unsustainable.
[00:24:53]  They don't make enough EBITDA.
[00:24:55]  They don't make enough earnings to cover their first interest payment.
[00:25:00]  They had to pay, it's such a huge debt offering that the underwriting fees are like three quarters of a billion dollars.
[00:25:08]  And after they pay that, they're completely broke.
[00:25:11]  And they're like, shit, we're going to have to go bankrupt.
[00:25:16]  And it's this complete kind of cluster fuck that really threatens to embarrass the banks and everyone involved.

=== Debt Crisis Disrupted (10:18) ===

[00:25:23]  But everybody is involved.
[00:25:25]  So they figure something out and they hire this guy, Tom Krauss, to clean it up.
[00:25:30]  And you would have to be kind of sadistic to want to take that job because he had to fire like 40% of the employees.
[00:25:42]  And this is a company that had been through a lot of layoffs because Elliot management had been like it had had a big hedge fund on its board of directors and it had been like already in this sort of like, you know, downsizing process.
[00:25:59]  But he just starts firing everybody.
[00:26:00]  But the first thing he does before he fires anybody is stops, you know, gets control of the payment systems and cuts off unnecessary contracts or contracts that you know he views as we don't really have to pay that guy.
[00:26:16]  And this is what they all do, you know um.
[00:26:19]  There's another uh gentleman who I think is going to be really important in the Trump administration, Steve Feinberg, um of the private equity firm Cerberus, and uh Feinberg, you know this is a very classic move.
[00:26:35]  They don't pay anybody, any of their portfolio companies, any, you know, any vendor that they owe money to, you know, they try to negotiate contracts where they have 180 days to pay and then they don't pay anyway.
[00:26:49]  So this is, but, but he cut off all these companies, including sadly, like this company that made Citrix branded Pride merch for employees.
[00:27:01]  And they ended up having to sue.
[00:27:04]  But Krause, so I don't know exactly, it's still unclear exactly how Krause came into the orbit of Trump, but Citrix is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
[00:27:18]  He moved out for the job.
[00:27:20]  So I imagine that, you know, that was part of it.
[00:27:23]  And then also a lot of the people who were involved in the Citrix LBO were also involved in the equally large, almost as catastrophically dumb Twitter LBO.
[00:27:36]  So there were a lot of, and these two deals were happening, happening at the same time.
[00:27:40]  It was a real big challenge.
[00:27:42]  It took like all of the like clout of Wall Street to sell all of these bonds at the same time.
[00:27:50]  And there was just a lot of insider dealing in terms of trying to, you know, kind of sell off these like these dog shit bonds that were not going to be paying, you know, they were not going to be making their interest payments.
[00:28:01]  They were going to have to immediately sort of renegotiate.
[00:28:05]  So Krause gets tapped at some point by, I assume it's Elon's people, but he very quickly sort of ingratiates himself to Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary.
[00:28:19]  And he and Scott Besant and then Scott Besant's chief of staff start hammering on this acting Treasury Secretary.
[00:28:30]  I guess I'm not sure when Yellen resigned, but the Treasury Secretary, the Department of the Treasury had been being run by this career treasury staffer who was sort of like everybody, you know, everybody sort of looked up to one of those guys who knew more about how Treasury actually functioned, like then career staffer guy who's like, you know, institutional knowledge.
[00:28:56]  Exactly.
[00:28:56]  I'm sorry, ladies.
[00:28:58]  We on the Trump team, of which I have recently joined because I saw which way the wind was blowing, have a word for that.
[00:29:05]  In fact, a pair of words.
[00:29:07]  The deep state.
[00:29:10]  So the deep state guy that was at the head of treasury was taken out by a patriotic citizen named Scott Besant.
[00:29:18]  Right.
[00:29:18]  Well, Scott Besant, I mean, at first, tried to see if the deep state guy would play along and started like, you know, lobbying him to show him how to get access to treasury's payment systems.
[00:29:32]  And, you know, this Treasury Labrique, this guy has one of those names.
[00:29:38]  I don't know how to pronounce it, but this Treasury Saffir, acting Treasury Secretary, is like, no one's ever asked me for that.
[00:29:47]  That's really weird that you would be asking me for that, right?
[00:29:50]  Like, who are you?
[00:29:51]  You don't even work for the government.
[00:29:52]  At this point, Krauss is just like some guy.
[00:29:56]  He's like working sort of for the transition, but he doesn't have any official capacity.
[00:30:01]  Besent has been nominated, but, you know, Trump hasn't been inaugurated yet.
[00:30:08]  Like, this is like this, this Treasury Saffir is like, what the fuck?
[00:30:13]  And so he says no.
[00:30:16]  And then Besant gets confirmed.
[00:30:19]  And that guy is out.
[00:30:22]  And they fired him.
[00:30:24]  Yes.
[00:30:25]  He was put on leave.
[00:30:26]  He was put on administrative leave and then he resigned.
[00:30:30]  And Besant, you know, within a few hours, Besant, they had found somebody to give them access to these payment systems.
[00:30:40]  I guess they are in Kansas City.
[00:30:42]  And Besant sent Krauss and Marco Elez.
[00:30:47]  He's the what?
[00:30:48]  I wouldn't want to marry outside of my race.
[00:30:50]  Like he's the eugenicist guy.
[00:30:53]  It's actually, excuse me, fact check.
[00:30:56]  It's called miscignation.
[00:30:58]  Miscignation.
[00:31:00]  Miscegenation.
[00:31:02]  It's called miscegenation.
[00:31:03]  It's anti-miscegenation.
[00:31:05]  Eugenicist is where you just do miscegenist.
[00:31:09]  Eugenicist, you're trying to fuck me up.
[00:31:11]  A eugenicist is somebody who simply does not want his child to turn out like himself because maybe he's got too many moles and is of a religion that we don't have heaven.
[00:31:21]  No, I mean, I can relate to that, but I don't think that's, yeah, I don't think that's where he was coming from.
[00:31:27]  Oh, the normalized Indian hate guy.
[00:31:29]  Oh, that guy.
[00:31:30]  Yeah.
[00:31:31]  Don't, I wouldn't marry around my outside my race, normalized Indian hate.
[00:31:34]  He was also like, yeah, that guy, he's a Groyper, right?
[00:31:38]  He's like, yeah, he's a child Groyper who's like, who's no doubt been groomed in many chat rooms, many Discord rooms into hating subcontinentals and probably the blacks and the Jews.
[00:31:54]  But, you know, he's just, he's the funny thing is like when they try to defend and they're like, well, what does that have to do with his job?
[00:32:02]  Or like, you know what?
[00:32:05]  I would never want to be canceled with something I said like as a young person.
[00:32:09]  And he's like 25 and he said it and he and he made all of these statements like 12 minutes ago.
[00:32:15]  Like it's no, they have, I think he said them in September.
[00:32:18]  And it's funny because Musk and like the his ilk were like literally did try to present it as if he said it when he was like a teenager and like and it's coming back to bite him.
[00:32:28]  It's like that's how JD Vance two months ago.
[00:32:31]  Yeah.
[00:32:31]  JD Vance like, yeah, well, anyway, that was that's the thing that I'm trying to get away from because figuring out like trying to like hunt down all of the unfortunate things that those doggy kids have done on Discord.
[00:32:48]  I don't know how to do Discord.
[00:32:50]  So that's another thing.
[00:32:50]  And like I really can't add anything to that.
[00:32:53]  But I'm reading about all these people involved in, and you know, everybody in Washington right now is like, fuck, we need a tech reporter because like we don't understand any of this.
[00:33:02]  We don't have any sources.
[00:33:05]  Wired is like scooping everybody because they know people at the boring company in Neuralink, which is like what is Haddie.
[00:33:16]  And I'm thinking, fuck, man, like, I'm not going to be able to add any value here.
[00:33:21]  And then I see Tom Cress.
[00:33:22]  I'm like, I wonder who that guy is.
[00:33:23]  And it's like, oh, he's not 20.
[00:33:28]  He's like 45, but he looks like he could be like 57.
[00:33:33]  And I find you to be, I'm just going to stop you right here again, Mo.
[00:33:37]  You know, I read a lot of your articles and I feel like something that you do is I feel like you write fairly professionally, but then you are occasionally very cruel about certain men's appearances.
[00:33:47]  And you can't really, you're laughing now, but you do that.
[00:33:51]  You call them doughy.
[00:33:52]  You call them strange looking.
[00:33:54]  You call them, you, you, you use, you use, I think, I know what you're trying to paint a picture here, but the picture is disgusting.
[00:34:03]  I mean, maybe if you wrote about handsome men once in a while, but of course, no profile of Truanon.
[00:34:07]  But I, I, you, so he's ugly, you're saying he's ugly.
[00:34:12]  No, you know, I mean, again, I, and I don't have any problem with an ugly guy, honestly.
[00:34:17]  I, I have done this in the past.
[00:34:19]  It's just something that I, you know, when somebody is like especially repellent and then they embody that physically, it's like, oh, interesting.
[00:34:30]  But yeah, maybe I should just like you got to comment on it.
[00:34:33]  But it's also like because the scenes, I mean, the first weekend that was, this was going down, I got a call from a friend who is very connected in all of these DC sort of Republican neolib William Crystal defense circles because her sister is in that world.
[00:34:54]  And she was freaking out.
[00:34:56]  And she's like, there's kids in hoodies like running all over USAID.
[00:35:01]  Like it's, it's like a literal Kumo.
[00:35:04]  And I was like, yeah, I've been reading about it.
[00:35:06]  It's a pretty fucking literal coup.
[00:35:10]  But, you know, I was like, well, maybe I would like, I'm a middle-aged person and I decided that I would try to focus on the middle-aged evil men getting involved here instead, that that was, you know, where I would try to look because to me, I don't understand what these guys are, these hackers are doing with their read-only, read and write, you know, the AI guy who translated the scrolls or whatever the fuck, you know,
[00:35:39]  like that's not my world.

=== A Middle-Aged Evil Men Coup (10:09) ===

[00:35:42]  So, so yeah.
[00:35:43]  And as it turns out, there's some adults in this room and they are pretty vile people.
[00:35:51]  So Krauss, what's the kind of yeah, what's the playbook that he's running?
[00:35:55]  Because it's funny.
[00:35:56]  I was just looking at Feinberg, Steve Feinberg, who you were talking about.
[00:36:00]  And I was, I see this quote from him.
[00:36:04]  Actually, friend of the show, Elizabeth Warren, was questioning him at one of the hearings.
[00:36:12]  I can't remember which one, something about defense contracting.
[00:36:18]  And she's like, you've spent your entire career honing private equity tools to hollow out businesses.
[00:36:23]  Like, how are you going to do that?
[00:36:24]  What are you going to bring to the Department of Defense?
[00:36:25]  And he's like, I've spent a career restructuring companies and dealing with this.
[00:36:29]  So I will be bringing that to the Department of Defense.
[00:36:32]  Looking exactly what I'm going to do.
[00:36:33]  No, Feinberg is, he's also, look, he is a perfectly acceptable weight.
[00:36:41]  In fact, I think he ran a marathon once, although he's not a marathon runner.
[00:36:46]  He like, he ran a marathon on a bet.
[00:36:48]  Oh, he was a competitive tennis player, but he's, you know, he's been like super, he looks like he's been bald since he was like 18, but that's fine.
[00:36:56]  I, you know, love.
[00:36:58]  It takes all kinds.
[00:36:59]  Fucking skinhead.
[00:37:01]  His, his, speaking of dogs, and this is like, it's like too perfect.
[00:37:08]  His private equity firm is Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded Hades in Greek mythology.
[00:37:19]  He is one of the worst private equity guys I can think of.
[00:37:24]  Cerberus is up there with Apollo, but maybe worse than Apollo, just in terms of how like they're so scummy that other private equity firms kind of don't like them.
[00:37:39]  Or they, you know, they kind of just like, it's sort of like the way that all the Bitcoin guys got really upset about the rug pulls, you know, the Melanium.
[00:37:48]  Like, you're making us look bad by being that bad.
[00:37:51]  Would you describe them as like the EDM in of private equity?
[00:37:56]  I'm trying to think.
[00:37:58]  That probably, that probably fits.
[00:38:00]  I'm trying to think, is there like anybody more?
[00:38:03]  I mean, yes, yeah, that that tracks.
[00:38:06]  And there was actually a study in 2014 by Moody's of, you know, default rates among private equity portfolio companies.
[00:38:17]  And both Cerberus and Apollo had default rates of 67%.
[00:38:22]  So this is the number of companies that they buy out that they, you know, plunge into bankruptcy or insolvency.
[00:38:29]  Anyway, Cerberus started out like Apollo.
[00:38:35]  Feinberg was just a guy, a kid who worked for Michael Milken.
[00:38:40]  And the Trump pardon Michael Milken, by the way.
[00:38:44]  Yes.
[00:38:45]  Under probably under a lot of pressure from, well, Feinberg, you know, I think it was Mark Rowan who took credit for that, who I think was also potentially in line to be the Treasury Secretary.
[00:39:00]  But I find that name, Michael Milken, to be pornographic.
[00:39:04]  Yeah, it's not right.
[00:39:05]  I agree.
[00:39:06]  It ain't right.
[00:39:07]  It ain't right.
[00:39:07]  It doesn't sit in the mouth well.
[00:39:09]  The mouthfeel of the word is wrong.
[00:39:11]  No, yeah.
[00:39:12]  Very, very liquidy.
[00:39:17]  And also a bit.
[00:39:18]  Curdled.
[00:39:19]  I haven't, I, you know, it's been part of the, well, that was the thing about, that's the thing about private equity is that back in the Milken era, when, you know, again, you went to jail for doing some of this shit.
[00:39:36]  We all remember they were called corporate raiders.
[00:39:39]  And then in the 90s, they just took on this name private equity and everybody just went along with it.
[00:39:46]  You know, they'd been called look at these innovators.
[00:39:49]  LBOs.
[00:39:50]  Right.
[00:39:50]  Yeah.
[00:39:50]  And it's just like, why do we even like, I hate using that term because it's like, it's, it's like the war in Gaza, you know, like, it's not a fucking war and it's not fucking equity.
[00:40:01]  Like, yeah.
[00:40:03]  And it's dead.
[00:40:05]  And so Feinberg, he is now the undersecretary of defense.
[00:40:12]  So he is number two only to our friend Pete Hegseth.
[00:40:18]  I think that we can probably infer that that is not, you know, that like that Steve might have a little bit more.
[00:40:26]  It might be the boss might be actually the apprentice and vice versa.
[00:40:33]  Well, a lot of a lot of scuttlebutt around the mill world, which I'm in, it stands for military, is that Pete Hegseth's schedule is actually really packed with kind of his day-to-day activities of several bottles of liquor, one or two attempted rapes, and then, of course, impregnated women that are not his wife.
[00:40:54]  And so that doesn't leave a lot of time for like downsize or anything like that.
[00:40:58]  I would say, and this is completely off topic.
[00:41:01]  For somehow, in the past 20 years, soldiers started calling themselves warfighters.
[00:41:08]  It's so fucking beep.
[00:41:12]  It is so sorry.
[00:41:14]  I'm a warfighter.
[00:41:15]  You're a soldier in the army, asshole.
[00:41:17]  What do you think?
[00:41:17]  A warfighter?
[00:41:19]  I think that, yeah, that is even more offensive than private equity.
[00:41:23]  But also, it's like you want to make fun of people for like saying like unalive instead of suicide.
[00:41:28]  And then you're calling yourself a fucking warfighter.
[00:41:31]  Yes.
[00:41:31]  Well, unfortunately, a lot of warfighters do unalive themselves or like Hegseth, they grape others.
[00:41:38]  And so, you know, did I learn that from you guys?
[00:41:44]  I was like, oh, grape emoji?
[00:41:46]  Grape emoji.
[00:41:47]  Yeah.
[00:41:47]  It's the, yeah.
[00:41:49]  So Hegseth, I really, if you, you got to talk to people about their mental health and you got to make sure these soldiers aren't crazy.
[00:41:56]  Is anyone checking up on Heg Seth?
[00:41:58]  Because the last I saw of him, he was on a podcast talking about how gin was his beverage.
[00:42:02]  And I'm like, oh, I thought someone was going to quit drinking when heg Seth, if you are listening to this, let the darkness win.
[00:42:10]  Let it overtake you.
[00:42:12]  Reach.
[00:42:12]  Oh, the wife and kids have gone for the weekend.
[00:42:15]  Reach in the drawer.
[00:42:16]  You know?
[00:42:18]  But, but what were you saying?
[00:42:20]  But also, Heg Seth, well, I just, I also want to know, like, if he starts taking Elon's advice on impregnating, impregnating women who aren't his wife.
[00:42:33]  I mean, he doesn't have like the liquidity of Elon.
[00:42:36]  So that could semen strength or you, or is that, you're talking about money?
[00:42:45]  Anyhow, Hegseth has gotten really, I just feel like he's gotten away from us.
[00:42:49]  Like, we're not monitoring his drinking.
[00:42:52]  We're not monitoring as like, I mean, you know, there's so like there.
[00:42:56]  I don't know if you've read about this place.
[00:42:58]  It sounds so good.
[00:42:58]  It's a burst into flames in a goddamn cyber track.
[00:43:01]  He should have to blow into a breathalyzer every day before he comes into work to like show people PowerPoints.
[00:43:09]  That's the kind of thing that like that Trump used to do to Rudy, right?
[00:43:13]  Like he like not well.
[00:43:16]  No, I have not heard about this.
[00:43:17]  Trump used to make Rudy be like, he'd like give him sobriety tests.
[00:43:20]  He's just kind of like haze him and make fun of what a drunk he was all the time.
[00:43:24]  But I feel like Rudy, Rudy was like wandering in like the catacombs of Mar-a-Lago after the election.
[00:43:31]  Like he got into like the casks down there.
[00:43:34]  And I guess, I don't know if this is even true, but in my head, I genuinely am like, I recall Rudy being sort of like sargassoed and stranded in like a, you know, in a labyrinth underneath Mar-a-Lago, sort of wandering drunk.
[00:43:48]  And I, and now I think about it, I'm like, maybe Trump put him down there to like dry him out for a little bit.
[00:43:52]  Because Trump doesn't really like these guys all wasted because of his pathetic brother.
[00:43:57]  He was just there looking for the seller.
[00:43:59]  And it's crazy because, yeah, he was looking for the seller.
[00:44:02]  I feel like they don't let him in at any of the normal entrances.
[00:44:06]  So he has to sort of go through the basement, but then he gets lost.
[00:44:09]  But he always makes his way through some like back door exit that everyone forgot to like close off.
[00:44:15]  And I think where the liquor refrigerator is.
[00:44:20]  Rudy does come into Mar-a-Lago every weekend, just like licking his lips and rubbing his hands.
[00:44:24]  He doesn't have to where the white women are at.
[00:44:27]  No, literally, he has nowhere else to go.
[00:44:30]  Did they take it?
[00:44:30]  Yeah, they take everything.
[00:44:32]  But he's gotten also a lot more portly in the past few months.
[00:44:37]  And that could be because he's drinking more, or it could be because he's sobered up and got the classic addiction to sugar that plagues many after they're in the middle of the evening.
[00:44:47]  They do.
[00:44:48]  You should step up.
[00:44:49]  Like, wives, don't nag your husbands for pounding candy.
[00:44:54]  You know what?
[00:44:55]  You know what?
[00:44:56]  And again, a little digression here.
[00:44:58]  Bill Wilson, thank you for putting a large part in the big book, how you have to forgive your husband for cheating.
[00:45:04]  And if he gets fat and annoying and doesn't pay attention to your kids for the next three years, it's crazy.
[00:45:10]  The whole two wives say it's insane.
[00:45:12]  But so Heg Seth is there and he's like the fucking his, you know, his little combed hair.
[00:45:18]  He's like, I'm going to fucking get our warfighters.
[00:45:21]  They're addicted to DEI.
[00:45:23]  We want to make them addicted to murder.
[00:45:25]  But you've got these, you got this other guy back there who's like, he really does seem to be the one who's probably going to be stripping down the Pentagon.
[00:45:36]  Yeah, he is.
[00:45:36]  So his plan, and I didn't quite realize this.
[00:45:40]  And that gets back to another trend here with the doggy crew, which is Medicare advantagizing everything in the government.

=== Value-Based Care Innovations (06:56) ===

[00:45:51]  What's that mean?
[00:45:52]  So there's two guys that are kind of deeply involved in the doggy movement.
[00:45:59]  One of them is, I think he's actually like the co-he was supposed to be the co-administrator of it, a guy named Brad Smith, and who used to run in the Trump one.
[00:46:08]  He ran something called the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
[00:46:14]  This is a, it's almost like a healthcare doge that was created by Obamacare and it was created by the ACA.
[00:46:24]  And they sort of have this like little building next to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
[00:46:30]  And they're allowed to experiment with like innovative ways of delivering care.
[00:46:37]  It's their mantra is something called value-based care.
[00:46:41]  And that is what's, you know, it sounds like dubious enough on its own, but the whole thing is that it's, it's our alternative to volume-based care.
[00:46:53]  So value-based care just means like less, less care, but it will be a better value for the government.
[00:47:02]  So Medicare Advantage is where instead of having Medicare when you turn 65, they you buy into a sort of fraudulent insurance program sold by Humana or United Healthcare,
[00:47:23]  most likely, that gives you Medicare, you know, all the privileges of Medicare, plus like $25 in groceries every month or some bullshit, you know, plus dental care.
[00:47:36]  They're heavily, heavily, heavily marketed as well.
[00:47:39]  Yes, there's like you'll see.
[00:47:41]  They spend an enormous amount on marketing.
[00:47:43]  They do lots of targeted marketing.
[00:47:45]  And, you know, the, you know, there's, there's, I've seen Haitian community targeted marketing in South Florida.
[00:47:53]  And, you know, they're.
[00:47:56]  And it's basically to get people off of the public plan and to buy into these private plans.
[00:48:02]  Like, plus you get all this other stuff.
[00:48:04]  So it's like, why would you want that stinking old private free health care when you could get like shiny private way better?
[00:48:13]  Plus you get like grocery store coupons.
[00:48:16]  Right, exactly.
[00:48:16]  Healthcare.
[00:48:17]  And people buy it.
[00:48:18]  And the insurance companies get, for providing that, they get a flat fee every year.
[00:48:25]  And that can range anywhere from like $4,000 a year for a, you know, healthy marathon running 65 year old to, I think, I think it goes up to $30,000 a year.
[00:48:39]  And what the insurance companies all do is that they sort of have these staffs of like mostly nurse practitioners who sort of scour the country trying to find unique and esoteric diagnoses to add to like their their medical records.
[00:48:57]  Herpes three.
[00:48:59]  They're like there are all these diseases you've never heard of.
[00:49:03]  Believe me, I am a former sufferer of a male yeast infection.
[00:49:08]  And once I realized that that could happen to us too, which was to me from antibiotics, I was like, my mind is so open on diseases.
[00:49:17]  That's what I kind of started.
[00:49:18]  Open on diseases and open on gender, I think.
[00:49:21]  I know.
[00:49:21]  Well, that changed my whole view on gender because I was like, I don't even know what the fuck yeast is.
[00:49:27]  But I recommend probiotics.
[00:49:29]  You recommend yeast infection?
[00:49:32]  No, I mean, I think everyone should have one.
[00:49:34]  And most of you have to do it.
[00:49:35]  You should try Kiefer.
[00:49:38]  Sutherland?
[00:49:39]  Kept you waiting.
[00:49:41]  I think that's a good idea.
[00:49:42]  Right.
[00:49:42]  Or probiotic gummies.
[00:49:44]  No.
[00:49:44]  Oh, no, because nobody knows what probiotics are.
[00:49:47]  No woman in my life has ever been able to adequately explain to me what they are.
[00:49:50]  Oh, it's for your gut biome.
[00:49:51]  Okay.
[00:49:52]  gun to your head right now real gun what the is a biome you can't tell me i thought you needed bacteria in your gut oh sorry the reason you won't sleep with me is because you say there's too much bacteria on my body in general so it's okay if it's in my body it's just it's nonsense but i just took one of these pills and they got rid of it right away but boy did it ow um but anyways they go across the country and they look for crazy rare diseases Yeah,
[00:50:20]  well, they try to find, they just, they have this software program called Clinivations.
[00:50:25]  That's one that's, you know, no.
[00:50:28]  And if you think that AI is not going to innovate in this space, just waste you.
[00:50:33]  Yeah.
[00:50:36]  So, um, so anyway, so they collect these enormous sums from the government every year and then they just don't give you anything.
[00:50:44]  You know, you get sick.
[00:50:46]  Say there's a lot of, I mean, I've read so many like horrible lawsuits, but you know, the big thing is that they never want to let you into the emergency room.
[00:50:55]  They sort of contract with all the emergency rooms, the private equity firms that run emergency rooms, they contract with those guys to make sure that they don't get admitted.
[00:51:04]  You know, they never want to send you to rehab.
[00:51:06]  If you have like, you know, if you, if they let you have hip surgery, they're not going to let you stay in a nursing home to recover from it.
[00:51:13]  Basically, and they'll pressure you endlessly to just give up, you know, sign a DNR and move over to palliative care and then maybe to hospice.
[00:51:24]  And that's actually like the most the most lucrative.
[00:51:28]  And hospice is a great industry that private equity has really put its fingerprints all over.
[00:51:36]  Hospice is definitely, it's one of those.
[00:51:40]  It's the B2B SAS of healthcare for sure.
[00:51:44]  And that's because they don't have to give any service.
[00:51:47]  There's no oversight whatsoever in hospice care.
[00:51:50]  So you can just sort of bill them like $10,000 a month for literally nothing.
[00:51:55]  But most people do get drugs because that, like, if you give them a lot of drugs, they'll complain less.
[00:52:02]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:52:04]  That's what private equity loves.
[00:52:06]  God loves America.
[00:52:07]  So like, so the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation has really been at the forefront of trying to sort of convert everybody who's left in fee-for-service Medicare, the old school Medicare program, which like if you have any people in your life over 65 who you care about, make sure they're in that stay in fee-for-service.
[00:52:27]  But even still, it's been very rapidly privatized and by this value-based care mantra.
[00:52:35]  And it's a very big scam and it costs the government.
[00:52:37]  I mean, there are estimates that this has, you know, that this has generated a trillion dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse over the years.

=== Investigation Into United Health Fraud (15:52) ===

[00:52:47]  And now they want to, and SpaceX has actually sort of been a pioneer in exporting this business model to DOD.
[00:52:57]  And so where, so where before, if you wanted to sell, I don't know, like fighter jets or fuel tankers to the Department of Defense, There were all these regulations and they had to kind of like.
[00:53:15]  Test you every step of the way, and they had you know that they got to micromanage the process.
[00:53:21]  Um, they don't really want that anymore.
[00:53:25]  They're just give me a flat fee and leave me alone.
[00:53:29]  And um, tomorrow or tonight, Spacex is actually supposed to be launching.
[00:53:35]  Like as an example of this, Spacex is supposed to be launching um the test of its starship Super, Super Heavy, which is the one, the rocket that is supposed to bring us eventually to Mars um and whereupon it nukes the ice caps of Mars um.
[00:53:53]  But you know, it hasn't been working so well.
[00:53:57]  Just last month, actually on, like you know, the mid-january um, they did a test launch of the starship Super Heavy and uh, it exploded and um rained down something like 50 tons worth of um rocket debris on Turks and Caicos um and is probably poisoning children as we speak um the FA at the time it was like january 17th the FA said, well okay, you know,
[00:54:26]  we've got to find out what happened and we're not going to let this launch again until we find out, you know, until this investigation is concluded.
[00:54:34]  Well, what do you know?
[00:54:34]  Like, they still don't.
[00:54:35]  They still can't tell anyone uh, why it happened, but they're launching again tonight, um and uh, and the FA hasn't had anything to say about it.
[00:54:46]  Well, that's because the FA is, i've heard, going to partner with one of the greatest companies in the world and sorry, this is an outbreak right now Starlink, where they they want to replace.
[00:54:55]  I mean, i've been, I I have no idea where this is at now, but certainly, like the past couple weeks, there's been all this talk that Starlink might get Verizon's contract to revamp the FA'S systems.
[00:55:06]  Yes, it's a 2.4 billion dollar contract and everybody at FAA has been instructed to not put anything in writing about it because it's it's just like so brazen.
[00:55:17]  But um, but yes, Starlink is going to, you know, get they're getting the communications upgrade contract and you know Tesla, of course, got that um, that that State Department armored vehicle contract um, that was supposed to be six hundred thousand dollars and now it's like four hundred million dollars um, so this is just, you know, it's an orgy of um self-dealing and um a very,
[00:55:48]  A really shocking scenario.
[00:55:51]  But this, but Medicare, the way that Medicare Advantage operates, where like literally every year, you know, the various NGOs that track this sort of thing come out with very convincing estimates.
[00:56:07]  And actually, the Wall Street Journal last summer came up out with the most compelling estimate that I'd seen, just it was so detailed that these companies, these insurance companies are overcharging the government by, you know,
[00:56:22]  hundreds of billions of dollars a year, charging them, you know, United Health alone is charging for, you know, something like $10 billion a year to the government just for just for diseases that no doctor has ever treated, like, you know, adding to their Medicare Advantage, to their medical records.
[00:56:43]  So like these diseases are mostly fictitious.
[00:56:45]  Nobody's ever heard of them.
[00:56:48]  But they put them in this algorithm and pay them for it.
[00:56:50]  Belden's goiter has appeared on multiple people over the past 50 years.
[00:56:55]  It's seen as a sign of good luck in certain cultures.
[00:56:58]  Belden's goiter is real.
[00:57:00]  But wait, is it the new target of doggy getting rid of Medicare fraud, which by the way, I am almost positive they're talking about like they're just going to go after like random small-time people who have like ripped off Medicare in some way.
[00:57:17]  There's no way they're going to go after like United Health and these big companies.
[00:57:20]  I mean, is there?
[00:57:21]  Well, United Health might be an exception because, and I think that like Luigi is the only the only explanation I can think of for this, but apparently United Health is under an investigation right now.
[00:57:38]  And this investigation has actually continued unlike literally every investigation into any like horrible crime any rich, you know, powerful entity was doing.
[00:57:50]  The United Healthcare investigation is apparently still ongoing.
[00:57:55]  And like I said, there's a lot of United Healthcare.
[00:58:00]  They might be trying to blame, they might be trying to punish Minnesota, which is where United Healthcare is based.
[00:58:08]  And I think that like Tim Waltz was like, he had nice things to say about the guy who was shot.
[00:58:15]  But there's a lot of new United Healthcare connections within the Trump administration.
[00:58:19]  I don't know why they are letting this investigation continue for whatever reason.
[00:58:28]  But I can only think that the Daily Beast wrote this like story about how Luigi's crowds that he attracted in the courtroom were so much bigger than Trump's crowds.
[00:58:44]  And it is something that I've heard like around a lot that like Trump is like intrigued by Luigi.
[00:58:51]  So whatever.
[00:58:53]  So apparently United Healthcare is actually under investigation.
[00:58:56]  But I'll tell you what is not under investigation is the Adani group of India, who's like the Elon Musk of the Musk clan of Modi's India.
[00:59:08]  Yeah.
[00:59:09]  They went away for a bit, but now they're like fully back.
[00:59:13]  The Adani group.
[00:59:14]  The Adani group.
[00:59:15]  Well, they were charged.
[00:59:16]  Like they were indicted for bribery.
[00:59:19]  And I really don't know what Biden's DOJ was doing, like indicting the Adani group for bribery over like an a solar project in India.
[00:59:29]  Like I really, oh, yeah.
[00:59:30]  I don't know why they got involved.
[00:59:32]  I can tell them about like a lot of like way like less controversial cases domestically they could have pursued.
[00:59:40]  But the Biden administration had a lot of foreign corrupt practices.
[00:59:43]  They had a big like Operation like kleptocracy crackdown and the kleptocracy crackdown squad at the DOJ has been completely disbanded.
[00:59:56]  This is why Eric Adams and there's a South Jersey political boss, George Norcross, a lot more.
[01:00:07]  I'm sure that this hospital bust out that was Steve Feinberg's private equity firm sort of created called Steward Health.
[01:00:16]  There was a big investigation into that.
[01:00:18]  And I'm pretty sure that that's been done away with as well.
[01:00:23]  So white collar crime is pretty much legal again, or it's been pretty much completely decriminalized.
[01:00:32]  United Health might just be, there are a few things.
[01:00:34]  They're keeping the FTC intact.
[01:00:36]  So they're like, you know, going to be going after mergers.
[01:00:40]  But I think, I think that they're just keeping some options open in terms of trying to punish their enemies.
[01:00:46]  This is a total sidebar, but I just wanted to run this past you really quick because I have a theory about the inflated hospital bills and the billing, which is that, you know how like hospital groups are like completely and totally enmeshed with insurance conglomerates, basically?
[01:01:05]  That like the inflated, they work kind of in tandem to generate the inflated bills, which are then delayed to use as like to use to generate margin on medical bill hypothecation.
[01:01:20]  So they're turned into assets for loans that are then like flipped.
[01:01:24]  That's my like theory on a lot of that.
[01:01:27]  I have like, I've been trying to figure that out too, because they are, I mean, there are a lot of schemes.
[01:01:32]  There's a lot that they get out of that.
[01:01:33]  Think a big thing is tax breaks because all of the like, you know, when they get charity care, they can write off enormous sums just being like, you know, we did like $5 billion in healthcare on like homeless people.
[01:01:48]  And it's like literally eight homeless people.
[01:01:51]  Yeah.
[01:01:52]  But they do generate a lot of tax savings that way.
[01:01:56]  So there's a lot of, there's a lot of reasons.
[01:01:59]  The kind of just like esoteric financialization of these conglomerates is sort of like tough to take in where it starts to seem that even these like, you know, insurance and hospital kind of like mega corp entities are also like private credit kind of generators too.
[01:02:18]  You know, like they kind of by the magic of financialization, they've kind of like turned themselves into that.
[01:02:24]  It's well, the thing is about healthcare is that, you know, I don't know, there's, there's doctors and there's like hospitals, there's some, you know, equipment that they use, but pretty much most of the money that you spend on healthcare ends up in like some fucking middleman, whether it's like the HMO or the PBM or the revenue cycle manager.
[01:02:49]  I mean, there's just like so fucking many of them.
[01:02:51]  And every time when you look up, you know, when I'm like, I have spent so much of my life trying to figure out like, what the fuck is a pharmacy benefit manager?
[01:02:58]  And, and like, what, like, how did these companies start?
[01:03:02]  And when you look, you know, at like what they were doing, these companies were doing in the 90s or, you know, whenever they started, it's always like, we're going to make, you know, we're going to combat waste, fraud, and abuse.
[01:03:14]  You know, we're going to like make healthcare, we're, we're all about cost containment.
[01:03:18]  And it's always like, so, so that's, that's part of the, the whole doggy paradox that we're seeing right now, which is that everything that they claim to be doing is actually the opposite of what they're actually doing.
[01:03:37]  Almost like the name private equity itself.
[01:03:39]  Like, yeah.
[01:03:41]  It's, I guess the thing that like frustrates me so much with a lot of the doggy stuff is that like our government is in like large parts of our government does have like the regulators, for instance, like have like they're like captured by the industries that they regulate in large parts.
[01:03:58]  Like there is so much fraud, waste, and abuse.
[01:04:02]  But like these guys aren't trying to come in here and like fix that and actually make a government that works for us.
[01:04:07]  These are some of the most mercenary individuals who like almost take glee in the pain of others that are coming in there to like just strip it and not create something better, but create something worse or create something also bad in a different way.
[01:04:22]  And like, that's what's so frustrating to me because you end up having to do like almost like a defensism of these like completely like like bloated and uh captured institutions because the things that people want to put in place or or sometimes they want to put nothing in place are just also like horrible, you know?
[01:04:43]  But in a way, like it tracks a lot of like their foreign policy stuff and a lot of their, I guess, domestic policy stuff too, where it's like it has a lot of the same core tenants that are believed in or not necessarily same core tenants, but like there's the same doing things for the sake of bolstering essentially like their backers bank accounts or the class that they belong to, but just like doing away with a lot of the niceties and like the things that adorn it.
[01:05:11]  Exactly.
[01:05:12]  And it's and I think that's one thing that has like because, you know, nobody knew like two months ago, no one really knew that this was going to happen.
[01:05:24]  I mean, I obviously didn't think that any of this whole doggy plan was in good faith.
[01:05:31]  I didn't think that Elon Musk was actually going to like, you know, legitimately look for waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
[01:05:39]  But I didn't think that he would be trying to do shock treatment and cause a Great Depression, but also, you know, take away the New Deal, like eradicate the New Deal and cause a new Great Depression at the same time.
[01:05:55]  That was not on the proverbial bingo card.
[01:05:59]  But the thing is that like the first thing he did, the very first thing they did was fire all of the inspectors general.
[01:06:09]  And these are like the last, like literally.
[01:06:12]  Okay, Mrs. Mueller.
[01:06:13]  Yeah, the inspector general is of these agencies of like the, you know, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture.
[01:06:21]  They all have these inspectors general and they investigate allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse and corporate capture.
[01:06:31]  You know, they're the source of unbelievable reports that, you know, nobody reads except people like me and nobody ever does anything about.
[01:06:41]  But they are the sort of untouchable, you know, they aren't, you don't fuck with them.
[01:06:45]  Like I don't think that Trump won fucked with the inspectors general of agencies very much.
[01:06:54]  A lot of them have been there for ages.
[01:06:56]  The USDA inspector general has been around since 2002 and Trump just fired all of them.
[01:07:04]  And it's like, okay, well, you know, if there was ever any sincere effort to kind of figure out where the waste in our government is, it would probably have to start with talking to these guys.
[01:07:15]  And they have no interest in that.
[01:07:18]  So, like it's it is, we're still sort of dealing with, um the shock of what is is happening because everything has been going on so quickly.
[01:07:32]  I was at a um hearing this morning um, in one of the probably like five dozen cases um filed against um uh, Doggy and the um Office OF Management AND Budget um, which has been the kind of internal sort of coordinator of a lot of these um, a lot of this uh Coup and Trump um, and this is one that was um.
[01:08:00]  This is a case that was filed by the National Treasury Employees Union um, and pertaining to the shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency um, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and um Elizabeth Warren's agency.
[01:08:19]  But don't that, don't hold that against them.
[01:08:22]  Um, and the CPFB was not like I. You know, I remembered not being particularly impressed with it.
[01:08:29]  You know, under Obama or um, there was a lot of people that came in and out of there that then ended up working for like the people that the CFPB was specifically tasked for going after.

=== Dawning Realization (02:23) ===

[01:08:40]  So it was like not immune from very like typical institutional capture.
[01:08:45]  Yeah exactly yes, and that's how everyone in the Obama administration was.
[01:08:50]  But when uh, when Warren did her deal with the Biden folks to stay in the primary um and and uh yeah uh, Ratfuck, Bernie um, she extracted some important concessions um, and one of those was Lena Kahn and one of those was Rohit Chopra, who ran the um CPFB, uh under Biden, and um Chopra uh went to Wharton, um,
[01:09:18]  he has like a he kind of personally detests a lot of these, a lot of these guys um, and he was very, very effective regulator, and as was Lena Khan.
[01:09:29]  You know there were, there were some effective regulators in the bush, in the Biden administration who, um who made the business community really, really angry, and they were um, they were quiet about it, but I think that after october 7th, they like channeled a lot of their rage toward the Biden administration um into um, into Israel.
[01:09:57]  Uh or, you're talking I mean, I don't have to put words in your mouth but there's some names here that immediately come to mind, such as Sean Maguire, the world's most Irish Jew I don't think so actually, but you know he's interested in us at least and of course, Bill Ackman, um Ackman.
[01:10:14]  I mean, I think that everyone who was in those billionaire group chats, really.
[01:10:19]  Yeah.
[01:10:20]  And, you know, some of them had been supporters of Trump before, like Mark Rowan.
[01:10:25]  But I really do think that like the Ivy League anti-Semitism struggle sessions and like all of that shit, I think that a lot of it had to do with just making instilling fear in the Democrats and in the Biden administration.
[01:10:44]  Like they found their moment and they were able to kind of like seize on it.
[01:10:48]  And I think that the Biden administration did get that in a sense.
[01:10:52]  Like I think that they were very terrified of, you know, all of the, but, but they also, you know, Biden was basically dead.

=== Dawning Realization (02:48) ===

[01:11:03]  And I think that like now it's dawning on a lot of Democrats that the oligarchs are not with them.
[01:11:12]  And like that like the Mark Cubans and like, you know, that they, they thought that they kind of had most billionaires on their side and they don't.
[01:11:22]  And it's causing this like this split where like a lot of I've been really surprised because I don't really have friends who are, you know, moderate, normie, Pete Bootig's Dems, but I know a lot of parents, like my kids go to school.
[01:11:42]  And I can't tell you how many people have told me you, you have no idea how much like support, there's silent support there is among like moderate Democrats for what Elon is doing.
[01:11:58]  And it's like.
[01:11:59]  Yeah.
[01:12:00]  But I don't get that like at all.
[01:12:03]  Like I know that I'm clouded by my like hatred of Elon Musk.
[01:12:08]  It's really hard for me to like once you kind of cross the Rubicon with him.
[01:12:12]  I think it's really tough to kind of to put the, you know, the glasses, the like they live glasses back on.
[01:12:19]  I'm mixing so many metaphors here, but let's just say I can't like put the glasses back on and see how Libs like saw him before all of this.
[01:12:30]  And I can't like, I don't understand watching what's going on and being like, well, you know, maybe there is some abuse in there.
[01:12:38]  There is some stuff.
[01:12:39]  It's like when it's so very clear, that's not at all what's going on.
[01:12:43]  Yeah, that's not what they're doing.
[01:12:44]  I think that a lot of it has to do with, I was, I was actually speaking to like a agency commissioner who was like, I just wish that more people had read about, you know, Pinochet or Latin American coups because this is like, that's what's happening and they just don't see it.
[01:13:05]  And I was thinking about that, like when Elon Musk, like, you know, brandishes his chainsaw that at CPAC that Javier Millet, you know, bestowed upon him, like that is so freighted with so much meaning.
[01:13:22]  Like, how many books have we all read about that playbook?
[01:13:26]  And so that's another thing is that, you know, that a lot of people don't.
[01:13:34]  Understand, like they don't like the, because the Democrats don't talk about this this, this is stuff that people like us talk about but, like there are so many Normies out there who don't know anything about the Organized Right, they don't know, you know, what the Reagan administration um did.

=== George Soros' Hedge Funds (09:23) ===

[01:13:51]  They don't know how they kind of created um the Office OF Management AND Budget um during, you know, during the Carter administration, in order to kind of facilitate this sort of extra legal um, you know, defunding action um.
[01:14:06]  They don't understand how um this, you know the, the Powell memo, like they might have heard, heard of it, but they don't really understand like how um literally everybody took that and they certainly don't know.
[01:14:19]  I mean, and this is the, this kind of gets to the other thing that I wanted to talk about because um, Scott Besant, who's the highest ranking, obviously the highest ranking um uh, member of this sort of um Doggy Adult club.
[01:14:35]  Uh, the Treasury secretary not a lot known about this guy other than he's gay and he's been living in Charleston um, and we love southern Charlotte.
[01:14:46]  We do listen, and I want to say that we might just be mixing up the accents there, because the Charleston accent is, you know, the gay guys know what i'm talking about here.
[01:14:55]  As usual um, so besant um, and i'm, you know I I still haven't really kind of nailed him down, but he has spent most of his life working for George Soros and when he hasn't been working for George Soros, he has been running hedge funds that are like liberally endowed by um, George Soros.
[01:15:17]  That makes it sound way um, dirtier than I meant, but like when he started, you know, he started a few hedge funds and every time he starts a hedge fund, George Soros invests like two billion dollars, like which is yeah, he gets in.
[01:15:29]  There is what you're saying.
[01:15:30]  Yeah, he's and in the 90s, throughout the 90s, Scott Besson was Soros' equities man in Europe.
[01:15:41]  I have found quotes in which Scott Besson in the 90s speaks approvingly of austerity policies in Italy.
[01:15:52]  I don't know if he was at all involved in Soros's massive operation in Russia at the time.
[01:16:01]  But I think that like the outside of the private equity bust out model, the only thing that seems comparable to what's going on in our government right now is the shock treatment and rapid privatization efforts that Harvard oversaw, or a bunch of economists from Harvard oversaw with USAID funding in Russia starting in the early 90s.
[01:16:29]  And a lot of the groundwork for all of that was laid by George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, who is a real nice guy now.
[01:16:40]  Get him off the podcast.
[01:16:41]  I'm sick of him.
[01:16:42]  All these fucking guys, Jeffrey Sachs, they're always on all these things.
[01:16:46]  Jeffrey Sachs, Douglas McGregor, Scott, whatever.
[01:16:49]  They're like all part of the like, like, I get it.
[01:16:52]  You think we should be at peace with Russia?
[01:16:55]  Okay.
[01:16:56]  But you don't got to go on every podcast and say it.
[01:16:58]  I'm sick of seeing these fucking guys.
[01:17:00]  Get like a, I don't know, maybe like a cool young, like, you know, guy like me to go out and talk across and be like, listen, things have gone out of control.
[01:17:13]  It's just ridiculous.
[01:17:13]  I'm sick of hearing Jeffrey Sachs.
[01:17:15]  I mean, I like, I always like anyone like that who has like, you know, Normie Cred.
[01:17:21]  Like, I am a sucker for anybody who's sort of, you know, a dissident or who changes their mind, right?
[01:17:27]  A famous person who's a public intellectual who has some sort of moment and decides to say something different from, and, and, and decides that I'm right, you know, as opposed to before.
[01:17:39]  But, uh, but Sachs is really slippery around the subject of shock treatment because he kind of distances, he distances himself from it like very aggressively now, but he was so inextricable from shock treatment in the 80s and 90s.
[01:17:58]  Um, and this is, and Soros spent a lot of money sending uh Jeffrey Sachs around, kind of um, teaching various Eastern European countries and then also Bolivia, maybe, um, how to liberalize their markets.
[01:18:12]  And um, this sort of culminated in the operation in Russia.
[01:18:18]  Um, and they had this guy, they had this guy, Jaeger Gaidar.
[01:18:22]  He's the guy who kind of looks like Doug Kraus or did.
[01:18:25]  Um, he's dead now.
[01:18:27]  And then he, I don't know, he was discredited somehow, and it all fell on this guy, Anatoly Chubais.
[01:18:36]  And Chubais was like a huge, and I don't even know, he's a huge fan of Milton Friedman.
[01:18:44]  And like, how is he even reading Milton Friedman?
[01:18:46]  I guess like communism really was falling apart because like I wouldn't never let into my country.
[01:18:54]  Like I would like to the country before fucking Milton Friedman, you know?
[01:18:59]  But yes, absolutely.
[01:19:02]  It's but same, like similar fucking, you know, at the same outcome, right?
[01:19:09]  So Chubais and, you know, this kind of all of these sort of Soros endowed foundations and Harvard are all sort of imposing, you know, they go into the government and they decide that they're going to privatize all of the state-owned enterprises in Russia in like, you know, two months.
[01:19:36]  And as a, you know, bonus to all the people who are not going to be served by these state-owned enterprises anymore or going to be price gouged by them, they're going to get the opportunity to invest in shares.
[01:19:51]  Basically, they got options or they got vouchers.
[01:19:54]  And the voucher system was a little bit like very meme coin-esque.
[01:20:02]  It was very like all of the funds went bankrupt.
[01:20:08]  Like there were four major funds that were selling them.
[01:20:11]  And nobody ever, I don't think that anybody ever ended up getting anything, but some people who still had shares sold them very cheaply.
[01:20:21]  The economy sort of went into hyperinflation.
[01:20:26]  And it was a complete disaster.
[01:20:28]  And USAID ended up suing Harvard.
[01:20:32]  And this is all happening when Larry Summers is leading the World Bank and Clinton is putting a cigar, you know where.
[01:20:47]  The world's about to change.
[01:20:49]  It was a vagina cigar.
[01:20:54]  But it was like, you know, sort of eerie when I started hearing about this Doge dividend that Elon and co had planned.
[01:21:03]  And it was actually some hedge fund guy, again, who worked for Greenlight, but was misrepresenting what he did.
[01:21:10]  I think he was like the mail guy at Green Relay.
[01:21:12]  And then he was telling everyone that he had been like the chief of equities.
[01:21:18]  And he was going on.
[01:21:23]  He started going on Fox News and talking about how they were going to send out a Doge dividend of $5,000 to all households who weren't so poor that they didn't pay income tax.
[01:21:35]  So just middle class households.
[01:21:37]  From the quote-unquote savings, from all the money that they were spending.
[01:21:42]  Yes, that represents the savings.
[01:21:46]  It makes me so mad how little they understand how things work.
[01:21:49]  Yeah.
[01:21:49]  Yeah.
[01:21:50]  I mean, it's ridiculous because it's like, I thought we were trying to get like, I mean, it's just insane.
[01:21:56]  Anyway, it's totally insane.
[01:21:58]  And they are making it more insane.
[01:22:01]  I mean, what they said, like over the weekend, they said that they were going to stop calculating the GDP in the normal way and like eliminate government expenditures and start calculating.
[01:22:14]  But that doesn't make this makes no sense.
[01:22:16]  We already do that.
[01:22:17]  It's just another line item in the report.
[01:22:19]  So what they're saying is it's already, you can already like go in when they report all the GDP numbers every quarter.
[01:22:26]  You go in and you can see and it's like, oh, what, what about GDP minus expenditures?
[01:22:31]  And you can see it's a line item.
[01:22:32]  There's no reason to do that.
[01:22:34]  The only reason to do that is because they're trying to fuck around with what's reported publicly so that when, if and when they cause a recession or cause a contraction in GDP, which is being forecasted right now, by the way, and actually was just the forecast was increased, meaning the contraction was increased.
[01:22:58]  So GDP was decreased significantly.
[01:23:03]  I think it's the Atlanta Fed that was putting that out.
[01:23:07]  But it's so that they can be like, they can fudge all the numbers and say that things aren't what they look like.
[01:23:12]  That's what I think.
[01:23:13]  Well, there's no reason to do it.

=== Baby App Gains Echo Chamber (10:55) ===

[01:23:15]  Kind of retreat further and further into their like, their own universe.
[01:23:20]  And all of the media will be a fucking echo chamber, so it won't fucking matter.
[01:23:24]  And what reality will we live in?
[01:23:25]  Who knows?
[01:23:27]  And the problem is, is like, you know, what's his face?
[01:23:31]  Steve Ratner, the former Obama car star, a real dickhead.
[01:23:36]  But he wrote an op-ed today in the New York Times being like, ah, I'm, you know, makes me nervous because all the people I know support this.
[01:23:46]  And, you know, it's so, but, uh, but I found a funny interview with Jubais.
[01:23:54]  There were 400 privately licensed funds that had collected 40 million private privatization checks, so-called vouchers.
[01:24:00]  From those, we distributed a total of 144 million to the public.
[01:24:03]  We thought that these funds were helping people to invest their vouchers wisely.
[01:24:07]  The ordinary on the man on the street couldn't know, after all, whether gas, oil, or machine production offered the best prospects.
[01:24:14]  All 400 funds went bankrupt, and the vouchers of 40 million citizens became worthless.
[01:24:19]  That's why 40 million Russians are convinced I am a scoundrel, a thief, a criminal, or a CIA agent who deserves to be shot, hanged, or drawn and quartered.
[01:24:28]  And that's pretty much it.
[01:24:30]  He is hated.
[01:24:32]  A USAID official or no, an embassy official said, we created a virtual open shop for thievery at a national level and for capital flight in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars and the raping of natural resources.
[01:24:45]  But so in 1995, the communist parties actually win 42% of the seats in the Duma.
[01:24:53]  But it doesn't matter because they just Yeltsin just gives Chubais the authority to kind of pass all of these presidential decrees.
[01:25:02]  And they don't actually end up doing anything.
[01:25:04]  Like the Duma has been rendered completely powerless.
[01:25:08]  And Putin is, you know, really like the only way out of this is Putin's rise and the, you know, kind of return of authoritarianism.
[01:25:20]  And he actually successfully figures out how to tax the oligarchs.
[01:25:25]  But I, you know, I look at USAID as an institution that does stuff like what Elon Musk is doing now.
[01:25:33]  And it's so confusing.
[01:25:35]  I wonder, you know, like why they had to shut down USAID first.
[01:25:40]  I understand why they hated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
[01:25:45]  But, and, and I can only think that maybe, um, maybe it's the favor to Putin, you know, because otherwise they should love that shit.
[01:25:54]  Yeah, part of me thinks that like, I really genuinely do think that, and it's true to an extent, like there's this, like, this, this long time, I mean, since they both were founded, strain of like liberal internationalism in both the CIA and in its baby, the USAID.
[01:26:14]  And, you know, part of that manifests itself, I mean, the CIA in different ways, but the USAID in like sinecures, in like jobs programs, essentially, for like what you might call the deep state and, you know, places like Georgia or Hungary sort of operating in concert with the Soros network.
[01:26:34]  And it could be like sort of a broadside against that strain of like liberal internationalism or globalism, whatever you want to call it.
[01:26:42]  But really, I think liberal internationalism is the way I think of it that sort of works in concert with, I mean, and the thing is, the reality is I'm glad USAID is shutting down for the most part.
[01:26:53]  I mean, they do do the problem is with USAID is they do do things that are good, but then they also do a lot of things that are pretty nasty.
[01:27:00]  And so it makes it hard to talk about because people are like, oh, well, I mean, do you support baby starving?
[01:27:05]  I'm like, well, yeah, baby starving.
[01:27:07]  Do you like malaria?
[01:27:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:27:10]  Well, I do like malaria, but that's for religious reasons.
[01:27:14]  But it, yeah, it's just, it's a, it's a mess.
[01:27:19]  Well, we got to wrap up.
[01:27:20]  But everything you were just laying out, just to make it explicit, you know, everything that kind of the Harvard boys and Larry Summers and Soros and Jeffree Sachs and all these people were running on Russia.
[01:27:35]  I mean, it does feel like that is happening with doggy, right?
[01:27:41]  Like it does feel like there's not just a kind of like carving up of some. parts of whatever's left of the federal government because it seems like, gosh, how much can there be left?
[01:27:54]  You know what I mean?
[01:27:55]  Like you want to cut.
[01:27:56]  I mean, that's what's always so funny, too, when they say, oh, we want to cut the budget.
[01:27:59]  We want to do this.
[01:27:59]  It's like, what are you going to cut?
[01:28:02]  It's not that much you can cut unless you're really going after the three big things, which is Pentagon, Medicare, and Social Security, right?
[01:28:11]  But, and it sounds like they actually will be doing that.
[01:28:14]  I was going to say, yeah, I think they have.
[01:28:16]  But kind of when you take it all in toto, right?
[01:28:20]  It does feel like a kind of leveraged buyout that's happening where these guys are coming in and trying to restructure things or run this shock therapy playbook, which I do think like begs the question, well, okay, usually when that happens, then it means that it's to institute something next, right?
[01:28:41]  It's like, because it's not that they're coming in to liberalize, just to liberalize markets, like closed markets, right?
[01:28:47]  Like you would in, you know, in the former Soviet Union or something.
[01:28:52]  Like there is, it does seem to me like there's, you know, if you're trying to force pain that you think you could control, right?
[01:29:02]  Or and by that I mean like a contraction or a recession or something even bigger, like a depression, right?
[01:29:09]  Or if you're trying to in whatever, you know, scale, make the economy screen, right?
[01:29:19]  Even as a form of punishment towards whatever kind of like small, you know, regulatory gains or disciplinary gains there were during the Biden administration, whether that came from labor or from regulators, right?
[01:29:33]  Like all of this feels like it's not just that they're trying to open up just the coffers to like, you know, take what they can for themselves.
[01:29:46]  I think there's that, but also that there's like something else going on, I guess is what I'm saying.
[01:29:51]  And maybe that's just my like female intuition, but that there is a sort of plan for, well, if this does, if this does all go down, if we are successful and we can like cause this shock therapy like moment, it means that maybe we can institute something next.
[01:30:06]  And it's like, well, wait, what's that?
[01:30:09]  You know?
[01:30:11]  Yeah.
[01:30:11]  And that's kind of, I mean, that I think that the biggest mystery now is why So many normie conventional corporate types are going along with this because it's going to be so devastating, even for many of them, or it's going to be scary in any case.
[01:30:34]  And, you know, during COVID, right?
[01:30:38]  I mean, there was, you know, this terror that went through the markets.
[01:30:41]  And then there was this extraordinary effort to normalize everything and make sure that the economy kept coming along and make sure that people had jobs and made sure that small businesses were going to, you know, make out okay.
[01:30:55]  And this is trying to create a synthetic crisis that has potentially worse and more disastrous and devastating effects.
[01:31:10]  I mean, real estate for one in my area, you know, there's a lot of places where real estate will just plunge.
[01:31:16]  It's already been under so much interest rate pressure.
[01:31:19]  And what I've learned from watching the fallout of private equity takeovers is that there isn't the end game is the shit ends up in bankruptcy court.
[01:31:32]  We don't get caught.
[01:31:33]  And then in bankruptcy, there'll be a lot of really cheap assets that only we know how to buy because, you know, it's the whole, all of the shit is just too esoteric and complex.
[01:31:46]  And that's sort of, there's this nihilism about it, but it's kind of a nihilism that, you know, we see in Gaza as well.
[01:31:53]  And now Syria, I mean, like Israel's trying to annex Syria now or like it where it doesn't really seem like a lot of guys, it doesn't really seem like there is an end game.
[01:32:10]  And I know that, and I, and I think that like, that's probably a lot of who you need to credit for that is Elon Musk, whose end game is to nuke Mars's ice caps.
[01:32:25]  So, um, well, listen, if you're not going to be able to do that, if anybody out there with powers of arrest is listening, you got to clean up the government for all these gangsters that are in there.
[01:32:40]  And I'm talking about the old ones and the new ones, all of them big old prisons, and everybody is in it.
[01:32:46]  And this is another thing: these private equity companies are stripping our prisons bare.
[01:32:51]  And when I get in power, which is surely within a year or two, three, four, but you know, within very short lifetimes from now, even if you're very old, you might get to enjoy it.
[01:33:01]  We're going to need really high-functioning, large prisons for a lot of people because we're going to be locking a lot of people up.
[01:33:12]  Mo, thank you for joining us.
[01:33:13]  You can read Maureen Kasich at Takachik at The American Prospect and a lot of other places.
[01:33:25]  You write for other places as well, right?
[01:33:27]  I just wrote something for the nation.
[01:33:30]  But yeah, mostly today I'm working for the prospect because I have two kids and I don't get to freelance a lot.
[01:33:37]  But, you know, who knows?
[01:33:41]  Who knows what may happen?
[01:33:44]  But for now, yeah, prospect.org.
[01:33:46]  And that's where you can find me.
[01:33:49]  And on X the Everything app.
[01:33:52]  On X the Everything app.
[01:33:54]  We'll link some stuff down in the description.
[01:33:57]  With that being said, my name is Brace Ackman.
[01:34:01]  I'm Liz.
[01:34:02]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:34:06]  And this has been TrueNON.
[01:34:08]  We'll see you next time.
[01:34:10]  Bye-bye.